Day: September 10, 2014

After years of marketing buzz about 4K and cloud-enabled TV, OTT, multiscreen, and the future of the set-top box (STB), there are tangible signs of forward progress on all of these fronts.

Silicon, per usual, is the catalyst for actual mass market implementation of new, advanced technologies and services, including 4KTV and the virtualization of STB functionality.

Several weeks ago I was in a major U.S. electronics retailer to buy some memory, i.e., USB drives and an SD card. After the purchase was complete, I stopped by the TV section to take a quick look at the 4KTVs. Not even 30 seconds passed by when a sales clerk approached me, and said something to the effect that 4K is so much better than current HD technology, implying it does not make sense to buy anything else. Having been around the block a few times at various TV/video industry events over the past decade or so, there were of course a number of things I could have said to the salesman, but I simply replied, “There is no doubt that 4K is the next big thing in TV, but the fact that so little content is accessible is a fairly major hurdle.” And as any well-trained sales guy should do, he responded accordingly, citing the impending wave of 4K content, as well as the fact that 4K TVs also up-scale HD content. But the bottom line is that linear broadcast 4K is years away, unless one lives in Japan. Continue reading “IBC 2014: After Years of 4K and Cloud TV Hype, Will We See Anything New in Amsterdam?”→